Resources

On November 20th, Triad Abolition Project, Hate Out Of Winston, and Drum Majors Alliance co-signed a letter to city council, which did not receive a response from any Council member nor the city’s Mayor. On November 29th, the Winston-Salem Journal published “Police-spending critics call on city to discuss their concerns.” The People’s Report is a community dialogue in response to the Journal’s story, and continued conversation on the topic of divesting from WSPD as our city approaches the FY2021-2022 budget cycle.

This report was written by Pascal Emmer, Woods Ervin, Derecka Purnell, Andrea J. Ritchie, and Tiffany Wang for the COVID19 Policing Project, hosted by the Community Resource Hub for Safety & Accountability. It gathers and expands on regular project updates, and is the first in a series on the impacts of policing and criminalization in the context of the coronavirus pandemic.

On International Human Rights Day, the Center for Constitutional Rights outlines necessary steps that the Biden administration and the 117th Congress must take to begin shifting power back to the people. Our 100-day demands, rooted in human rights and international law, challenge systemic discrimination and the unjust distribution of power and public resources and amplify the future visions articulated by impacted communities and movements for social justice. In defining immediately actionable, rights-based measures for the federal government, we are guided not by what is practical, but by what is necessary, just, life-giving, and liberatory.

This new collaborative document edited by Mariame Kaba outlines ten major steps required to successfully launch a new paradigm for real safety, and includes helpful messages and responses for those with doubts, existing institutions that help create real safety, a deeper dive on police and prison abolition, and more models to explore.

This kit is designed to consolidate the information regarding Invest Divest strategy and resources for Louisville, Kentucky. This kit is intended to be used for the following: refer to this document for campaigning at the social media level, share this document with your base, and hold teach-ins and trainings on the uses of narrative and social media for this campaign, post directly from your own personal channels, and share to and from the partner organizations listed here.

This ACLU research report examines whether circumstances surrounding the public health crisis — unprecedented societal isolation combined with relaxed police department routine enforcement — has led to a change in the frequency with which the police fatally shoot people in the U.S. Analysis reveals that the police have continued to fatally shoot people at the same rate during the first six months of 2020 as they did over the same period from 2015 to 2019. The report also demonstrates that Black, Native American/Indigenous, and Latinx people are still more likely than white people to be shot and killed by police. The report puts forth a set of recommendations designed to reduce police departments’ role, presence, responsibilities, and funding, including dramatically transforming use-of-force laws, and instead reinvest into community-based services that are better suited to respond to actual community needs.

This is the first of a series of reports on the performance of face recognition algorithms on faces occluded by protective face masks commonly worn to reduce inhalation of viruses or other contaminants. This report documents accuracy of algorithms to recognize persons wearing face masks.

Alex Vitale offers ten ways to make communities safer for everyone. The following concrete steps present a way forward, one that would begin to reduce reliance on policing.